America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (57 page)

Within the next forty-eight hours, ISIS forces seized Ramadi in Iraq along with the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. The simultaneous loss of these two cities shattered any illusions that the war was heading in the right direction. For Americans, the fall of Ramadi, by car only a ninety-minute drive from Baghdad, came as a particularly bitter blow. Psychologically, losing this city, site of what had seemed a tide-turning U.S. victory in the previous Gulf War, was the equivalent of the Tet Offensive back in 1968. The light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel was fast receding.

Once again, panic laced with finger-pointing swept Washington. Senator John McCain wasted no time in holding President Obama personally responsible for what he called “a shameful chapter in American history.”
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The loss of Ramadi left “President Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State in ruins not only in Iraq but also throughout the Muslim world,” Frederick Kagan announced. He too fingered President Obama as directly responsible for a setback that Kagan declared “unnecessary and avoidable.” The most recent ISIS offensive had “completely derailed” Obama administration policy and left the region “engulfed in war.”
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Retired army General Jack Keane reached a nearly identical solution. “We are losing this war,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The root of the problem was obvious: “There is no strategy to contain the destabilization of the Middle East.”
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The antidote was equally obvious: escalation. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina felt certain that injecting another ten thousand GIs would surely do the trick.
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Frederick Kagan went further. He proposed bolstering the existing U.S. commitment to Iraq with another fifteen thousand to twenty thousand U.S. troops—not to engage in large-scale combat operations but to deepen the support being provided the Iraqis. General Keane emphasized the need to expand operations in Syria, which he described as an ISIS safe haven. That meant more (and more effectively conducted) air strikes and many more U.S. special operations raids into Syrian territory.

The administration begged to differ. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, a Harvard academic appointed to replace the lackluster Hagel, wasn’t going to let Iraqis off the hook. Ramadi had fallen because the units assigned to defend the place had performed abysmally. Although “vastly” outnumbering the attackers, they had “failed to fight,” he charged. Ramadi showed that “we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight.”
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General Dempsey, the JCS chairman, offered an even more withering assessment. Iraqi forces had simply turned tail. They weren’t “driven out of Ramadi,” he said, “they drove out.”
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Even so, rather than caving to his critics, President Obama stiffed them. At least for public consumption, the mantra of “degrade and destroy” remained intact. The administration affirmed its basic approach to achieving those goals. In truth, few outside of the administration dissented from that basic approach. Even critics inclined to see in ISIS proof that the sky was falling refrained from pressing for the United States to reinvade and reoccupy Iraq.

By this time, the high priests of national security had tried and discarded several approaches to imposing America’s will on the Greater Middle East. Time and again, from Lebanon in the 1980s to Afghanistan thirty years later, they had underestimated what it was going to take to do the job right—with Operation Desert Storm the one partial and very temporary exception. However great the danger posed by ISIS, civilian and military leaders alike remained committed to the proposition that eliminating that danger was not going to require anything more than a fragment of the nation’s full military strength. As a consequence, the alternatives under active consideration in the summer of 2015 amounted to variations on a single theme. Option 1 was more of the same, option 2 more of the same plus, and option 3 more of the same with a double plus. There was no option proposing an all-out effort to win and none that said, “This isn’t working; we need to get out of here.”

As was his habit on military matters, the commander in chief chose the middle course. Obama ordered a few hundred additional American trainers to Iraq. Plans to take Mosul were quietly shelved. Regaining control of Ramadi now became the priority—and even that looked to be several months away. The president also promised “the expedited delivery of essential equipment and materiel” not only to Iraq’s army but to just about any other Iraqi group willing to fight ISIS. Re-equipping had emerged as a priority due to the Iraqi army’s penchant for abandoning its kit on the battlefield. So, for example, the Pentagon announced that it was rushing an order of antitank weapons to Baghdad to help Iraqis defend against the hundreds of captured American-made Humvees that had become the conveyance of choice for ISIS suicide bombers.
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The United States was rearming an Iraqi army that had become the principal source of arms for the forces that were overrunning Iraq itself.

In the eyes of his critics, Obama’s response to the crisis offered the worst of both worlds. It was mission creep combined with gradual escalation.
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In some quarters, the manifest defects of this approach fed suspicions that Inherent Resolve was mostly for show—a cover story for what was actually a policy of retreat and disengagement.

In particular, an American right wing that loathed Obama as passionately as the left had loathed Obama’s predecessor suspected the president of nefariously plotting to get out of Iraq by allowing Iran in. Diplomatic negotiations initiated to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, they believed, were actually intended to end that country’s exclusion from regional politics. On the surface, the likelihood of an American rapprochement with Iran appeared remote, if only because the government of Israel (not to mention Saudi Arabia), backed by Israel’s supporters in the United States, was adamantly opposed. Now, however, the increasingly disordered condition of the Middle East and the failure of past American efforts to quell that disorder, further compounded by the bad blood between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, suggested that the time might be ripe for a Nixon-goes-to-China moment.

In a sense, the hardliners had good reason to denounce Obama’s supposed “appeasement” of Iran. Removing Iran from the official American enemies list—as Obama had already done in the case of Cuba—was likely to have game-changing implications for a raft of existing U.S. commitments and obligations.
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Obama’s real offense was not that he was giving Iran a green light to acquire a nuclear arsenal; it was his refusal to defer to the wishes of Israel and Gulf Arabs, who wanted Iran kept in its box.

Recall that America’s War for the Greater Middle East had begun in Iran with the overthrow of the Shah and the subsequent hostage crisis. Since then, apart from the bizarre Iran-Contra episode, Washington had viewed Iran as the “other,” to be ignored and isolated. Of course, Iran had returned U.S. hostility with interest. During the next several decades, something between a cold war and a real war had ensued. Intervening on Saddam Hussein’s behalf during the First Gulf War, the United States had all but destroyed Iran’s navy. Payback came in the Third Gulf War, when Iran provided weapons and technological support to Iraqi Shiite militias who were killing U.S. troops.
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Most recently, the United States had collaborated with Israel in orchestrating a series of covert attacks aimed at retarding Iran’s suspected efforts to develop nuclear weapons. This was Operation Olympic Games, initiated by President George W. Bush in 2006 and then embraced by his successor. The most notable episode in this campaign occurred in 2010, when the United States employed a computer virus called Stuxnet to penetrate Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. Although the attack disabled as many as a thousand Iranian centrifuges, Iran wasted little time in repairing the damage. Here was the Hiroshima of cyberwar—an attack launched, like Hiroshima itself, because a capability existed without much thought given to the implications of legitimating its use.
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By Obama’s second term, however, U.S. policy toward Iran was shifting. Rather than attempting along
with
Israel to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, the United States was seeking
despite
Israel to persuade Iran to curtail that program in return for economic and political concessions. In July 2015, complex and protracted negotiations involving all five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany and Iran produced an agreement—a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

While some celebrated the outcome as a diplomatic triumph, others denounced it as a capitulation. In the latter camp were the several Republicans vying to succeed Obama as president in 2016. Senator Lindsey Graham pronounced the JCPOA a “death sentence for the state of Israel.” Rather than curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the deal “paves Iran’s path to a bomb,” former Florida governor Jeb Bush said. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, another presidential hopeful, predicted that as a direct result of the agreement, “millions of Americans will be murdered by radical theocratic zealots.” New Jersey governor Chris Christie chastised Obama for having made “humiliating concessions.” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee charged the president with marching Israelis “to the door of the oven” and vowed, if elected, “to topple the terrorist Iranian regime and defeat the evil forces of radical Islam.”
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Prime Minister Netanyahu predictably characterized the agreement as “a historic mistake.”
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With trademark hyperbole, Max Boot described the deal as “the date when American dominance in the Middle East was supplanted by the Iranian Imperium.”
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In reality, “American dominance” of the region was a chimera and would remain so.

More to the point, the rush to declare the Iran nuclear deal a disaster was as premature as declaring the overthrow of Saddam Hussein or Moamar Gaddafi a historic victory. The agreement’s actual implications would only emerge over time and were likely to differ from the expectations of both proponents and naysayers. In this one respect, diplomacy is akin to war: Long-term outcomes tend to differ from near-term expectations.

Yet even while these negotiations were still underway, Iran itself had effectively enlisted in the war against ISIS. The Islamic Republic might not be an American ally, but it was taking on America’s latest enemy in the Greater Middle East. Like the United States, Iran elected to play a limited role. It provided Iraq with materiel, advisers, and air support, all under the aegis of the Quds Force, the functional equivalent of U.S. Special Operations Command.

The resulting alignment of friends and foes was anything but straightforward. The United States and Iran were on the same side, except when they weren’t. Within the territorial confines of Iraq, they faced a common enemy while sharing a common near-term objective—preventing ISIS from gaining complete control of that country. That common purpose did not extend to Iraq’s future, however. Shiite-majority Iran clearly intended to exercise considerable sway over its Shiite-majority neighbor and wasn’t about to ask Washington’s permission to do so.

Within the territorial confines of neighboring Syria, the United States and Iran again faced that same immediate adversary. Apart from seeking to defeat ISIS, however, their purposes were radically at odds. The United States clung to the hope of “moderate rebels” ousting the Assad regime, while fearing that radical Islamists might actually succeed in doing so. For its part, Iran was resolutely determined to keep Assad in power in defiance of American insistence to the contrary. For Tehran, having a friendly regime in Damascus was essential.
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It was all a bit like Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. FDR had fancied that Poles and Czechs, once liberated from Nazi occupation, might enjoy freedom and independence. Stalin had other ideas. With the fate of Eastern Europe mattering more to the Soviet Union than to the United States, Washington didn’t see the issue as worth fighting for. Poland and Czechoslovakia soon slipped behind the Iron Curtain.

As much as Americans might nurse fantasies of Iraq, once liberated from ISIS, enjoying freedom and independence, Iranian authorities clearly had other ideas. And like Stalin in 1945, they enjoyed several advantages, not least of all proximity. Keeping Iran out of Iraq and ejecting it from Syria would come at a very high price. Obama was no more inclined to pay than Roosevelt and Truman had been when tallying up the cost of preventing Eastern Europe’s absorption into the Soviet sphere.

In the autumn of 2015, no one could say with certainty how the fight against ISIS was going to turn out. But victory, if achieved, was likely to come at the expense of Iraqis and Syrians—precisely as the Allied victory over Nazi Germany came at the expense of Poles and Czechs. Iran was going to end up the principal beneficiary, with the United States ill positioned to do much more than register protests. This Obama appeared to recognize even if his more bellicose critics did not.

Would defeating ISIS actually solve anything? Probably not, since the conditions that had given rise to ISIS would still persist. Yet focusing on this one specific manifestation of a larger problem provided an excuse to skip lightly past matters of far greater moment. It was like foreign drug cartels and the American epidemic of drug abuse and addiction. You can pretend that attacking the former will reduce the latter, but you’re kidding yourself.